Listen to This #8

MEN IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Calling Nurturing Men to the Teaching Profession

Most of my 35 years as a teacher was spent with students in grades K through 3. The quote below from Nancy Bailey suggests that it was difficult because of the strong-willed women I worked with. I can think of only one or two cases where I was made to feel unwelcome at the primary level from my colleagues.

It was much more difficult to deal with parents who were skeptical that a man could give their child the nurturing education necessary in the primary grades. Even worse, were those (few times) when parents actually requested another teacher because they didn't want their daughters in my class. I understand the fear that makes a parent do that. The news stories of teachers who betray the trust parents have put in them and abuse children are frequent enough that there are some parents who would be scared to take a chance. I understood the parent request...but it saddened me.

From Nancy Bailey

Men who teach early childhood education have a lot of moxie. It can’t be easy to walk into an elementary school of strong-willed women who know the craft of teaching.

Some of my third grade students during recess on the last day of school, 1976-1977.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

Why Churches Should Hate School Vouchers

Normally, I like to keep quotes short...one or two sentences, or a paragraph at the most. With this quote from Peter Greene, however, I felt like I needed to include two paragraphs.

Vouchers entangle Church and State, despite the ruling of the Indiana Supreme Court, and as such, are a danger to both the public schools and the church schools accepting vouchers.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State listed ten reasons for rejecting vouchers. At the top of the list...Vouchers Undermine Religious Liberty. They wrote,

...vouchers force Americans to pay taxes to support religion. This runs counter to the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. In America, all religious activities should be supported with voluntary contributions.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders strongly supported the separation of church and state and opposed taxation to support religion. As Ben Franklin succinctly put it: “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

From Peter Greene (Curmudgucation)

Somebody is going to try to cash in on voucher money or make a point or indulge in performance art, and taxpayers will be horrified to learn that their tax dollars are going to support a school that promotes satanism or pushes sharia law or teaches that all white folks are evil (I am confining myself to outrageous things that will outrage people-- the list of outrageous things that people will happily put up with is a longer list).

So in the storm of outrage, taxpayers will demand that government make sure not to send voucher dollars to That School That Teaches Those Awful Things. Politicians will ride that wave, and before you know it, we will have a government agency whose mandate is to decide which churches are "legitimate" and voila-- the Government Bureau of Church Regulation.

Op-ed: Myth busting Indiana’s voucher system

From Rocky Killion (See Rise Above the Mark)

Instead of throwing more money at this unproven two-system approach, Indiana legislators should use Indiana’s resources on proven strategies that will improve public education, including early childhood education, reducing class size, investing in professional development for educators, and assisting students who live in poverty. These are the strategies the best education systems in the world have implemented to become the best.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS: FLORIDA

FL: Death To Public Education

Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio...all the states in which wealthy privateers are doing damage to public education...don't reach the heights of damage done to the public schools and public school children of Florida, according to Peter Greene at Curmudgucation. And Florida is, frankly, a terrible place to be a public school student right now. In this post, Greene lists many of the things that Florida has done to support privatization while neglecting or punishing public schools. The third paragraph in the article contains a list of actions so despicable that only the most ardent "reformer" would fail to see the damage done to children.

The most recent legislation diverts millions of dollars from public schools to charter schools.

From Florida State Senator Linda Stewart quoted by Peter Greene (Curmudgucation)

The legislation you signed today gives to the charter school industry a free hand and promises them a bountiful reward. It allows corporations with no track record of success, no obligation to struggling students, and no mandated standards of accountability to flourish, with the sole obligation to their shareholders. Not the public. Not to well-intentioned parents desperate to see their children succeed – but to a group of investors who have made a business decision to add these companies to their portfolios because they are interested in making money.

HYPOCRISY

More Truth in Teacher-Written Education Blogs Than Corporate Media

The entire "reform" movement – the obsession with standardized tests, the growth of charters and vouchers – has grown up and taken over as the status quo of American education with virtually no input from professional educators.

• Have teachers been left out because teaching is a traditionally female dominated profession so the good-old-boys in state legislatures and board rooms across the country disrespect teachers as easily as they disrespect women in general?

• Have teachers been ignored because "reformers" assume that going to school is enough "experience" to dictate how education ought to be?

• Have teachers been silenced because millionaires and billionaires must be smart or they wouldn't be rich, so we must listen to their "new" ideas for education?

• Teachers comprise the last and largest labor unions left in the U.S. Are teachers shunned because destroying America's unions in order to raise up the oligarchy won't be complete until the NEA and AFT are relegated to the ineffectual level of other unions?

The hypocritical conflicts of interest within the political system are rampant, in which legislators and policy makers with economic and political ties to textbook and testing companies, charter management companies, and parochial schools, make policy for public education. Yet teachers aren't consulted about public education policy because they might be "biased."

From Steven Singer (Gadflyonthewall)

For some people, my position as an educator discredits my knowledge of schools. Yet getting paid by huge testing corporations doesn’t discredit journalists!?

POVERTY

School Choice Opponents and the Status Quo

• The status quo in American education is testing and punishing children, teachers, and schools. 

• The status quo in American education is diverting public tax dollars from public schools to religious, private, and privately owned schools.

• The status quo in American education is requiring "accountability" from public schools, while charters and voucher schools need not be transparent.

• The status quo in American education is closing public schools and replacing them with charters instead of fixing them.

• The status quo in American education is blaming teachers for student low achievement without society accepting a share of the responsibility for communities struggling with gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse, toxic environments, lack of health care facilities, and other effects of poverty.

From Russ Walsh

Those of us who continue to point out that poverty is the real issue in education are accused of using poverty as an excuse to do nothing. Right up front let me say I am against the status quo and I have spent a lifetime in education trying to improve teacher instruction and educational opportunities for the struggling readers and writers I have worked with. To point out the obvious, that poverty is the number one cause of educational inequity, does not make me a champion for the status quo. It simply means that I will not fall prey to the false promise of super-teachers, standardized test driven accountability, merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers, all of which are futile efforts to put a thumb in the overflowing dyke that is systematic discrimination, segregation, income inequity, and, yes, poverty.

POLITICS

About That Partisan Divide

From Sheila Kennedy

Today’s Republicans and Democrats do not share a belief in the nature of the common good. Democrats believe that government has a responsibility to ensure access to healthcare. Republicans don’t.

🎧🎧🎧

Linda Darling-Hammond: On Testing

I was thinking about the recent upheaval with PARCC testing, Pearson spying on students and reporting it to school districts, and the general misplaced confidence (or is it just economic investment) that American policy makers have with testing in this country. The renewed focus on testing reminded me of Linda Darling-Hammond's words during an interview in the film, Rise Above the Mark.

Darling-Hammond is an educator and researcher. She's not a politician like Andrew Cuomo who must to satisfy donors by throwing public money their way. She's not a pundit like Michael Petrilli who is ideologically focused on privatization. She's not an untrained mouthpiece like Arne Duncan who shills for testing companies and privatizers. She's an academic who has spent her career learning and teaching about students, schools,  teachers, and learning.

OUR POLICIES MAKE THINGS WORSE

What does this education professional say about what we are doing compared to countries in the world whose students are high achieving?

Compare that [what high achieving countries are doing for education] to reforms that are going on in the United States which largely are reinforcing inequality, deepening poverty, homelessness...and pretending to fix that with more standardized tests.

We have been testing without investing.

We have been testing way too much and with low quality multiple choice instruments that drive the curriculum in very narrow directions.

We've been deprofessionalizing teaching...allowing people to come in without adequate preparation, not supporting them in their learning and then trying to manage that with both systems of high stakes accountability and privatization, trying to put more and more funds into sectors that essentially increasingly are reducing the support for public education.

We cannot become internationally competitive from here, doing what we're currently doing...

We're making things worse by ignoring the effects of poverty, denying that it has an impact on education so that policy makers are relieved of their responsibility in the education of our children. Instead we blame children and teachers. Then, after making those mistakes, we are trying to fix the problem by calling for more testing under the mistaken belief that if only teachers and students would try harder, things will get better.

OUR TESTING MAKES THINGS WORSE

And what about that testing? Has the test and punish plan worked? Are the tests even valid? Has the amount that we have invested in testing been helpful?

The problem we have with testing in this country today is that, number 1, we're using the wrong kinds of tests, and number 2, we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways. We are the only country that tests every child, every year with these kinds of measures and then attaches all of these stakes to them -- whether a kid gets promoted to the next grade, whether they graduate, whether a teacher gets a merit pay bonus, whether they even keep their job, whether schools get rewarded or sanctioned or even closed down. The tests were never designed to support these kinds of decisions. They don't even measure the things you would need to measure to be valid for those purposes, in ways that would inform you.

...having those kinds of stakes attached to the wrong kinds of tests produces three very unfortunate outcomes.

The first of them is that we are narrowing the curriculum and dumbing down the curriculum to the subjects that are tested. We're narrowing and reducing the capacity of our teachers to teach what's important and our kids to learn what's important.

The second problem with high stakes testing is that it creates incentives to prevent high need students who struggle in school from coming into your school district or your school. And in a marketplace of schools, those who have the ability to fend those students off keep them out and it creates incentives to push them out...we've created a situation in which it doesn't benefit any school to keep the kids who struggle to learn because it will negatively impact their test scores...that doesn't serve the society well.

The third thing that happens with high stakes accountability is that all of the blame is now being put on individual teachers and educators particularly in high need schools where kids are coming from more poverty, homelessness, dysfunctional community settings, getting less resources in school. If the scores don't go up we blame the teachers or the principals and say, well, let's fire them, and it is deflecting attention from solving those other problems which are becoming more and more acute in American Society.

We're making things worse by 1) narrowing our curriculum, ignoring things like social studies, science, physical education and the arts, by 2) pushing out the very students who need the most help staying in school and are thereby taking away the opportunity to benefit from their contributions to our society and by 3) punishing poverty and the schools which deal with poverty.

Darling-Hammond understands the damage that our education policy is doing to our future. Policy makers, politicians, and pundits would do well to listen to her.

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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Rocky Killion is Right

INDIANA'S ISTEP DEBACLE, 2015

Two weeks ago, Rocky Killion, Superintendent of West Lafayette Community School District suggested that parents withdraw their students, homeschool them during the ISTEP test "season" and then re-enroll them when the test was over. His actual words, quoted by WTHR.com

I would prefer all of my students' parents withdraw and become home-schooled during ISTEP, and then we can re-enroll them.

Dave Bangert of the Lafayette Journal and Courier, came out against that suggestions saying it would be a "logistical nightmare."

But Heather Harvey, a board member of the New Community School public charter school, agreed with Killion, saying it was time for action.

This is the time to take action. It's one thing to complain about too much testing. It's another, much more powerful statement to refuse to let our children take the test.

I agree with Ms. Harvey. Logistical nightmare or not, our children shouldn't have to put up with the results of childish arguments of adults by taking what has become an exam so politically charged as to become meaningless...or more meaningless than it already was.

MISGUIDED ASSUMPTIONS

The entire mess surrounding this year's ISTEP test, the State of Indiana's "accountability" test for schools, teachers, and lest we forget them, students, is an indication of the misguided importance we, as a society, place on the standardized tests we give our children.

The assumptions by test-makers, politicians, the media, and much of the general public, are that

• standardized tests are valid and complete measures of student learning and can therefore be used for high stakes decisions about students' futures
• standardized tests are valid measures of a school's effectiveness and can therefore be used to reward or punish schools
• standardized tests are valid measures of a teacher's (or teachers') competence and effectiveness and can therefore be used to judge and retain or fire teachers

These assumptions are incorrect.


TESTS DON'T MEASURE WHAT YOU THINK THEY MEASURE

We rank students, fire teachers, and damage communities with school letter grades using standardized tests, but what is it that the tests actually measure?

There is substantial evidence that standardized test scores measure the family income of students. In study after study there is a direct correlation between the level of achievement of students and their family income. This is no secret...we've known it for years. At the end of this post are 10 links to articles and studies discussing the direct link between poverty and school achievement...there are dozens...likely hundreds more.

One could argue that the appropriate use of standardized tests, if there is one, is that of measuring student learning. But standardized tests only measure a small subset of what children learn in school and an even smaller subset of what teachers teach in school.

In The Case Against Standardized Testing, Alfie Kohn wrote that standardized tests measure what matters least in school.

...as a rule, good standardized test results are more likely to go hand in hand with a shallow approach to learning than with deep understanding..."most tests punish the thinking test-taker"...

In their explanation of What's Wrong With Standardized Tests? Fairtest.org wrote

These kinds of tests are very poor yardsticks of student learning. They are weak measures of the ability to comprehend complex material, write, apply math, understand scientific methods or reasoning, or grasp social science concepts. Nor do they adequately measure thinking skills or assess what people can do on real-world tasks.

And Professor Dan Koretz, of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, discussed testing and his book, Measuring Up. An interview of Professor Koretz, Measuring Up: A Q and A with Professor Dan Koretz reveals his position on the use of tests.

Don't take test scores to mean more than they do. Tests measure only some of the important goals of schooling, and even in measuring those, they are only approximate indicators. They are subject to measurement error; different tests of the same subject often provide a somewhat different picture; and indicators other than tests often tell quite a different story. Therefore, a single score, taken alone, cannot provide a comprehensive measure of the achievement of a student, and it certainly is not sufficient to judge the quality of a school or an educational system.

The high stakes consequences of these tests are inappropriate. If we use them at all, we should use them for reflecting on how the curriculum is taught, and how teachers might more effectively present material, not to determine which teachers are fired, which students are promoted, or which schools are closed.

OUGHTS

The roll out of this year's ISTEP has been a fiasco...a "casualty" in the war among politicians in Indiana's government. Rocky Killion is right...we ought to just cancel ISTEP and use the time set aside for instruction.

Instead of wasting money on ISTEP we ought to spend it on professional development to improve instruction for all students.

The legislature, instead of arguing and passing laws about achievement tests ought to be working on legislation geared towards higher employment, higher wages and the reduction of poverty.

In fact, we ought to cancel ISTEP every year...from now on.

The Link Between Poverty and Academic Achievement.

• Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success
• Income level has strong effect on school test scores, analysis shows
• Parental Income Linked to Students’ Standardized Test Results
• The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
• How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance
• The effects of poverty on academic achievement
• The Relationships Between School Poverty and Student Achievement in Maine
• The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children
• For the millionth time: the conditions poverty creates affect academic achievement
• Statistics on How Poverty Affects Children in Schools

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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Retention Wars: Blaming Children

THIRD GRADE PUNISHMENT LAWS

In the recent film, Rise Above the Mark, Linda Darling Hammond said,

The problem we have with testing in this country today is that...we're using the wrong kinds of tests, and...we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways.

More than a dozen states, including Indiana punish third grade children -- 8 and 9 year olds -- for low reading achievement by forcing them to repeat third grade. Retention in grade doesn't work...and we have known it for decades.

In the past, parents, teachers, and administrators used to make the decision to retain a student in his current grade. Now it's state legislatures, governors, and departments of education. We have allowed the wrong people -- politicians and policy makers -- to determine the academic placement of our children using the wrong kinds of tests in the wrong kinds of ways.

21ST CENTURY DUNCE CAP

Recent research in retention in grade mirrors past research from the last century. We do know that intense intervention helps...but, as a nation, we're not willing to spend the money to provide it for our children. We know that lowered poverty rates help, but, as a nation, we're not willing to face the fact that we have failed to reduce poverty in our country, and in fact, it continues to grow.

Yet state after state continues to force school systems to hold children back in third grade causing unnecessary academic and emotional damage by labeling students as failures. This is no more effective in helping children learn than was the 19th century dunce cap.

Oklahoma partially repealed their third grade punishment law last May. They are still doing the wrong thing, requiring children to be punished for low reading achievement, but at least now, they are letting parents and local educators have some input into the decision.

Of course some legislators, who claim to be for "local control" during campaign season, were not happy to yield to actual local control...

Legislature overrides Fallin veto on reading bill; Barresi calls decision a 'pathetic' step back

[The] bill shifts promotion-retention decisions about third-graders who score unsatisfactory on the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Test to teachers and parents.

The existing law required students not covered by certain exemptions to be retained.

...Sen. Gary Stanislawski, R-Tulsa said "...the decision that a child needs to be held back won’t come down to a single high-stakes test. It allows for a series of assessments throughout the school year and gives our local schools, professional educators and parents greater input.”

Notice that in Oklahoma the argument wasn't against retention, but was for local control. The change to the law requires local folks, parents and teachers, to decide whether or not to retain a child instead of the no-excuses policy of retaining everyone who can't read by third grade.

TEACHERS NEED TO LEARN THE RESEARCH

One problem with retention in grade is that it is supported by a large number of educators.

Many teachers don't believe the research and instead rely on "anecdotal evidence." An elementary teacher in a K-5 school building, for example, might retain a child and assume that all is well because the child does better the second year...and perhaps the following year as well. Unfortunately, the gains are usually short-lived.

Keeping children back a year doesn’t help them read better

(See also Does holding kids back a year help them academically? No. But schools still do it.)

...some studies have found academic improvement in the immediate years after retention, these gains are usually short-lived and tend to fade over time.

By the time the students start to lose the gains they have made -- and end up further behind than before -- they are often in another school, or too far away from the retaining teacher for her to continue to keep track.

...two problems lie in the popularity of such grade retention policies. First, while the Florida model has significant bi-partisan support among both Democrats and Republicans in the US, reviews of the outcomes of the Florida policy show research on it is misrepresented and inconclusive, at best.

Alongside this, 40 years of research into the policy of holding children back a grade refutes the practice.

In Florida, the gains of students who were retained were held up as an example of the success of retention, however, those gains from retention were supplemented by intensive interventions which could have, and should have been used without retention.

BLAMING CHILDREN

In American public schools, when something goes wrong the tendency is to blame someone else...and retention blames the student.

Despite a well-established research base discrediting the practice, the policy appears to endure for two reasons. A political and public faith in punitive educational accountability sits alongside a straw man argument that advocates keeping children back instead of “social promotion”, where they are automatically passed onto the next grade regardless of student achievement.

Teachers aren't given the training, support, and additional help they need to help struggling students. When a child fails to learn the response is often based on the false dichotomy of retention versus social promotion. "What else can we do?" What indeed...

The answer is to invest in public education...

Holding Kids Back Doesn't Help Them

Happily, there are more effective and less expensive alternatives. The cost of having a student repeat 3rd grade is several times greater than alternatives such as tutoring or small-group interventions, summer school, or high-quality pre-K. These approaches don't have the negative side effects associated with retention.

Instead of giving children the same treatment that failed them the first time, alternative strategies provide different kinds of learning opportunities.

Interventions should also begin long before 3rd grade. Research has provided compelling evidence that investments in preschool can reduce retention and have positive long-term payoff for individuals and society, in contrast to the negative long-term effects of holding a student back later.

Intervention costs money and America is so deeply invested in corporate welfare that public education and our children's future is being shortchanged. Today's education "reforms" are proof of the nation's desire to disinvest in our children.

We are giving the wrong kinds of tests. We're using them in the wrong kinds of ways. And we're hurting our children in the process.

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 201

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Doubling Down on Privatization

RISE ABOVE THE MARK

Last Friday night I traveled to Butler University in Indianapolis and attended a presentation of Rise Above the Mark, a documentary developed by the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation, which shines a light on the damage that privatization is doing to public education in Indiana and the nation. [Sponsors of the film's presentation were Butler University, Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society in Education and Kroger.]

After the movie we listened to a panel discussion about the privatization movement. Upon her introduction Diane Ravitch, who was one of the interviewees in the film, received a standing ovation from the obviously partisan crowd. In it's report of event, the Indianapolis Star wrote,

It was a two-sided debate in front of an audience hooting for one side.

That's true. The crowd was strongly biased against the privatizers and during the evening comments from Ravitch and Fort Wayne Community Schools Superintendent Wendy Robinson were received with cheers and whistles.

Here's the first of three videos containing the entire discussion. View them all at Rise Above the Mark -- February 28, 2014, Butler University

One of the last comments of the evening came from "reformer" David Harris, founder and CEO of The Mind Trust. He said,

One of the reasons that [reform] initiatives have gained so much currency, particularly charter schools, is that they are bipartisan issues. No one did more to launch charter schools in this country than Bill Clinton and no one has been a bigger advocate for charter schools than Barack Obama. This is an issue that is...the education reform community is actually an area where Republicans and Democrats are coming together. The Washington Post did an editorial shortly after [New York City] Mayor [Bill] de Blasio's election that said nothing is less progressive than the efforts against education reform. [emphasis added]

That's absolutely, and unfortunately true.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SUPPORT FOR PRIVATIZATION

When he was running for his first term (2007), candidate Obama spoke about NCLB and told the NEA,

Don't label a school as failing one day and then throw your hands up and walk away from it the next. Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test...You didn't devote your lives to testing. You devoted it to teaching, and teaching is what you should be allowed to do.

Four years later he spoke at a town hall and said,

Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools...

One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that's not going to make education interesting.

When he was running for president he consistently criticized "teaching to the test" and supported a well rounded curriculum.

Yet throughout his first term and continuing into the second, he has, under the leadership of his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, pushed the national education debate in favor of the corporate education reform industry.

In the Duncan Department of Education, standardized testing has been given even more weight than under the McGraw-Hill friendly Bush administration. Not only are students ranked and schools rewarded and punished based on test scores, but the Obama/Duncan administration has pushed the concept of evaluating teachers based on student test scores.

If anything was designed specifically to encourage teaching to the test, then Race to the Top is it...despite President Obama's words.

President Obama, as a candidate, gave us the impression that he didn't favor the excessive testing which has done so much damage to America's public schools over the last 30 years. His actions, however, haven't matched his words and, as President, he has done as much damage to public education as any Republican would have.

A FOX IN THE HEN HOUSE

So it's disappointing, but not surprising that he has doubled down on his damaging policy and announced the appointment of a leading privatizer to be second in command at the U.S. Department of Education.

In her article, Obama Picks Leader of Privatization Movement to be #2 in U.S. Department of Education, Diane Ravitch says of the nominee, Ted Mitchell...

He is a key figure in the corporate reform movement to transform public education and transfer public funds to private management, as well as to spur entrepreneurial activity and the involvement of the for-profit sector in public education.

President Obama has nominated him to be Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful job in the department.

The article quoted by Ravitch, The Education of Ted Mitchell, says...

In many ways, the Mitchell nomination reflects the ongoing battle being fought in Washington and in school districts across the country. It’s a battle that pits the views of teachers, their unions and community groups against a movement that is backed by wealthy philanthropists and corporations...

...critics like Ravitch say that Mitchell and NewSchools Venture Fund are in the forefront of a movement to privatize public education, a radical transformation that would benefit technology, testing and textbook companies such as Pearson, the London-headquartered multinational publishing and education giant.

Furthermore, the website of Students Matter names NewSchools Venture Fund as a supporter of Vergara v. California. This lawsuit, currently being tried in Los Angeles Superior Court, is aimed at scrapping teacher seniority protections in California. Vergara’s sponsor, Students Matter, is a nonprofit created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch – whom Business Week identified as a NewSchools investment partner...

Jeffrey Henig, a political science and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and an expert on the dynamics of education policy, says that the Mitchell nomination appears to send a strong message about the direction of education policy.

“This does look like a signal that President Obama is continuing to place more bets with the reform crowd,” he says.

See also HERE for Ted Mitchell's (and NewSchools Venture Fund) ties to Pearson, Khan Academy, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and other for-profit, and online education companies.

Late last year, I wrote,

...[the] two major party politicians are like members of the canine family. Republicans, he said, are wolves: it's clear where they stand on the issues. Their disdain for public education is open and vicious. On the other hand, the Democrats are like foxes: they smile at you to make you think they're your friends – and then, when you least expect it, they devour you.

I'm not suggesting to those who are fighting the privatization of public education that they ignore what their local politicians have done when election time rolls around next November. However, we must remember that no matter what the partisan label a politician has next to his or her name the campaign contributions from the Broads, Gates, Waltons and other school "reformers" will go a long way towards corporatizing politicians of both parties.

The corporate takeover of public education is bipartisan. Work for the defeat of the "wolves," but beware of the "foxes."

It's time to get the foxes out of the hen house...

"There is a place in America to take a stand: it is public education. It is the underpinning of our cultural and political system. It is the great common ground. Public education after all is the engine that moves us as a society toward a common destiny... It is in public education that the American dream begins to take shape." -- Tom Brokaw

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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